Successful product and service marketing often utilize personalized advertisements based on a potential consumer's location. Moreover, certain products and/or services may only be offered to consumers within a particular area, and therefore advertising such a product or service to individuals located outside of the limited marketing area is ineffective and may be a waste of company resources.
However, particularly for those products and services available in several marketing regions, companies are often required to expend significant resources in identifying the most effective marketing techniques for each marketing region. Companies often rely on marketing surveys and focus groups including small groups of individuals selected to represent each of various marketing regions in order to aid these companies in identifying the most effective marketing concepts to utilize in each marketing region. Because these marketing surveys and focus groups often utilize a small sample population to represent a particular marketing region, the information gleaned from these marketing tools may not be representative of the population as a whole in a particular marketing region. Additionally, the initial identification of each marketing region requires experts to define the boundaries of marketing regions based on additional market research generally based on other small sample populations.
Similar problems arise for regional and/or local companies seeking to expand their business to new marketing areas. In identifying potential new markets, companies may utilize similar market surveys and focus groups in order to determine the level of interest in a particular product and/or service in various areas. However, in studying the viability of company expansion to various areas, the company must first determine a plurality of areas in which the company may be interested in expanding. In making such a determination, companies may inadvertently overlook viable regions for expansion because information regarding these regions may be unavailable to the company.
Historically, companies have attempted to expand the amount of marketing research information available by utilizing widely distributed surveys, and by rewarding individuals who respond to these surveys with product samples, discount coupons, gift cards, and/or the like. These surveys are often distributed via mail or email to individuals on one or more mailing lists assembled by the company or by a third party entity. However, such surveys traditionally have a low response rate, and therefore companies may not obtain information indicative of a population in a region from these surveys.
Therefore, a need exists for systems and methods for obtaining market research information from a plurality of potential consumers, and for identifying each potential consumer's location such that location-specific market research information may be determined.